Home health care, also referred to as “in-home care,” “domiciliary care,” or “social care, is medical care provided by a skilled nurse to a patient in their own home, the home of a family member, or an assisted living facility (In Home Care Online). “The purpose of home care is to promote, maintain, or restore a patient 's health and reduce the effects of disease or disability. The goal of home care is to provide for the needs of the patient while allowing the patient to remain living at home, regardless of age, social and economic class, or degree of disability” (Encyclopedia of Surgery Online). Individuals who need home health care require some level of medical intervention to promote their health and well-being usually while convalescing from an injury or an illness. For the family, home care services are typically employed when a patient’s family wants the peace of mind knowing their loved ones are receiving the care they need. For the patients, it is feeling more comfortable in the safe and familiar environment of their own home, which in turn leads to less anxiety.
Who benefits from home care services?
Elderly patients in the early stages of dementia which enables them to continue living in a safe and familiar place for a longer period of time.
Disabled individuals so they do not have to transfer to a nursing home or rehabilitation center for additional care. They can continue living in their home maintaining a sense of peace and self-sufficiency.
Individuals who require continued rehabilitative services but no longer fit the hospital service’s criteria for assistance.
Families and caregivers so they no longer have to worry about the safety of their loved ones. The home health care team is able to perform the care d...
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...our home. This is what we have to remember about the beauty of home care: it’s at home” (Weisfeld Online).
All in all, the lack of data available to substantiate the time and care that are actually provided to a patient through home health care services is a major factor when it comes to getting the recognition and full compensation patients deserve. It is sad that the data collected by individual home health agencies is out there and has been collected for well over fifteen years but has not been evaluated. While individual home health agencies collect evidence of services they provide, the data is unclear as to the total time allotted for services, employee’s specialties, or types of coverage that will produce better patient outcomes. The available data also fails to detail services not covered through Medicare and Medicaid but are paid for by the patient directly.
Butler, R. (2008). The Carers of People with Dementia. BMJ: British Medical Journal , 336, 1260-1261.
...tion with the outside world and loss of their life style. Communities need to be educated on dementia so that as to include and create activities they can join in. The residential homes decision makers need to monitor the cares’ behaviour as they and address issues within their working environment to improve and keep everything up to standard. The government need to implement and review their policies to make ensure quality care in residential homes. According to United Kingdom Health and Social Care (UKHCA), (2012) and The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE), have been working on introducing new guidance which will help dementia patient to get more funding to live in their own homes and avoid living in residential home which is a positive move as people will still enjoy the comfort of their homes and receive excellent care.
Long-term care (LTC) covers a wide range of clinical and social services for those who need assistance due to functional limitations. These limitations usually result from complications associated with age related chronic conditions, from disabilities related to birth defects, brain damage, or mental retardation in children; or from major illnesses or injuries suffered by adults (Shi L. & Singh D.A., 2011). LTC encompasses a variety of services including traditional clinical services, social services and housing. Unlike acute care, long-term care is much more complicated and has objectives that are much harder to measure. Acute care mainly focuses on returning patients to their previous functional level and is primarily provided by specialty providers. However, LTC mainly focuses on preventing the physical and mental deterioration of an individual and promoting social adjustments to suit the different stages of decline. In addition the providers of LTC are more diverse than those in acute care and is offered in both formal and informal settings, which include: hospitals, physicians, home care, adult day care, nursing home care, assisted living and even informal caregivers such as friends and family members. Long-term care services have been dominated by community based services, which include informal care (86%, about 10 to 11 million) and formal institutional care delivered in nursing facilities (14%, 1.6 million) (McCall, 2001). Of more than the 10 million Americans estimated to require LTC services, 58% are elderly and 42% are under the age of 65 (Shi L. & Singh D.A., 2011). The users of LTC are either frail elderly or disabled and because of the specific care needs of this population, the care varies based on an indiv...
care to the residents suffering from dementia. Banner et al (2009 as cited in Lee J.et al.2012)
The quality of the home care must meet the essentials of the patients or service seekers. But it never means to fulfil the basic needs or requirements of the individuals who are seeking the service. On the other hand, if the home care is not able to meet the basic needs of the patients then this is important to analyse the certain reasons behind this (Janamian, et. al., 2014).
It involves the mental, physical, emotional, and medical domains of the individual’s life, but due to the fact that many of these services are publicly funded, gaps exist. Cox (2007) reported that “community resources were generally perceived as inadequate. None of our participants had ready access to social workers in the office, so arranging home health care, adult day care, and other community services added to the difficulty of primary care” (p. 82). Not only are the services and programs inadequate, recent economic dilemmas and ‘recession’ has reduced public spending to meager allowances. Another sore problem is Medicare and general health care programs for the less wealthy. This was the sentiment echoed by one physician interviewed: “If you told me I had to run this place on the basis of what I get from Medicare, I would have to tell you I couldn’t do it, which is kind of sad, because they claim that they’re bankrupt and everything. Where in the hell are they spending their money? They sure ain’t giving it to
Certain cultures that live at or below the poverty line prefer this type of assistance for their elderly family members because it allows them to have someone meet them at their home. This convenience is a big factor and provides the elderly with a way to fulfill their communal culture by living out their time at home among family, while still receiving any necessary assistance for health checks or IADL’s. This improves their quality of life by meeting their needs in a different way. These alternative methods to older adult care are more popular among minorities and cultural groups (Bookman & Kimbrel, 2011).
The reason this sort of placement occurs is because health assessments and medical care have traditionally required face-to-face meetings. Smart Home technology can help these older adults stay in their own homes and maintain their independence with the use of smart sensor technology. The technology can detect ones safety, activity levels around them, mobility adaptability, and health screening (Courtney, Demiris, Rantz, Skubic). Smart home technologies are information-based technologies that passively collect and share resident information with the resident and family members, in addition to primary care providers. These devices collect multiple types of data, which include physiological, location, or movement data.
Taking care of the individuals that are getting older takes many different needs. Most of these needs cannot be given from the help of a family. This causes the need of having to put your love one into a home and causing for the worry of how they will be treated. It is important for the family and also the soon to be client to feel at home in their new environment. This has been an issue with the care being provided for each individual, which has lead to the need of making sure individuals have their own health care plan.
Another focus for change is that over the years the demand for home and community care over hospital care has continued to grow, as stated by the Queens nursing institute “Recent health policy points to the importance of improving and extending services to meet the health and care needs of an increasingly older population and provide services which may have previously been provided in hospital within community settings”.
services finding out that they may need community care services. They do not have to make a
The long-term care system consists of an integrated continuum of many institutional and non-institutional providers who deliver extended care when needed. Long-term care providers deliver a variety of care to individuals with chronic, mobility and/or cognitive impairments/limitations. These providers include: nursing facilities, sub acute care, assisted living, residential care, elderly housing options and community based adult services (Pratt, 2010). A great majority of these providers are already taking care of the many baby boomers that are present today and will be present in the future. “Baby boomers” are individuals who were born between the years 1946-1964. Since 2011, every day 10,000 baby boomers turn 65 years old (Pratt, 2010). This
There is a 5 million estimate of the carers in the UK and figures are foreseen to upscale for the next 40 years to 9 million (O’ Dowd, 2007). With this high number of carers, for whom the carers can ask for support during times when difficulty arises in relation with taking care of people with dementia.
"Who does a son turn to, when his 78 year-old mother, newly admitted to a nursing home’s rehab unit, is experiencing delusions and screams through the night? Or where does a daughter turn to for help when she notices a rapid decline in her mother’s health and her mother refuses to seek medical care? Or the gentleman who believes it is time to a continuing care retirement community, but has no one to advise him on the myriad of financial and lifestyle implications of such a move? (Lederman, 2012)." Within in the field of home health care, ecological system creates an outline for defining what it means to provide quality care to the elderly.
teaching patient and family members of patients how to provide home care. The nurse also